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Snow Birds & Trout Lilies

Tandy Hills Natural Area is very much alive in the dead of Winter! The sound of snow falling and snow birds flying are filling the air above Tandy Hills Natural Area with beautiful music.

As the heavy, heavy snow continues to pile deeper and deeper, thousands of Cedar Waxwings and Robins are swarming over Tandy Hills. For the past few days the sky above our beloved prairie has become a kind of L.A. Freeway for uncountable numbers of these birds. The permanent residents, Cardinals, Jays, White-wing Doves and Sparrows are in a tizzy. Grackles are keeping their distance. The cosmopolitan invaders are pulling rank.

At the top of the local avian food chain, however, a Cooper's Hawk watched the countless newcomers with aplomb. The drive-thru window just came to her/him. Life doesn't get much better than this.

Meanwhile, the first Trout Lily of 2010 has already bloomed and posed gracefully for me last week. They keep blooming earlier every year, or it seems that way. The one pictured below is one of tens of thousands at THNA that are gradually reaching through the snow and up to the sky where the snow birds fly.

Ray Charles was right on when he sang that famous line from the unofficial Prairie Fest anthem, O What a Beautiful Morning:

"The sounds of the Earth are like music."

PS: Go here, to read about my February 2008 encounter with a drunk Cedar Waxwing:

"Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself."